Scoble’s Link Blog

John Kelly, a Washington Post columnist, gets a little teary-eyed when writing about the decline of the newspaper industry. In his Feb. 11 column “Read (But Not All!) About it”, Kelly begins by telling us that:

While more people are reading the work of Post journalists than ever before, they’re doing it via the Web.This is troubling for those of us who love newspapers as much as we love news. One of the reasons for the decline, I think, is that many people have never learned how to read a newspaper.

The fact that people have never learned how to read a newspaper does not even come close to understanding the complex array of forces behind why the industry has been in decline. In today’s “winner-take all” media world, whether or not we know how to read a newspaper has little to do with how people consume information now or in the future. In the first of 11 steps, Kelly instructs his audience, many of whom are reading his words online and not in a newspaper, to “enjoy the pleasant feel of the paper against your skin.” There is a lot of playful banter and sarcasism in all of this, but the reality is that old ways of doing things are often replaced by new ways. The reasons for such changes reside at the core of human communication.

In a 2001 newspaper readership trend study, the Newspaper Association of America found that “Daily newspaper readership has dropped from 58.6% of the population in 1998 to 55.1% in 2000. Meanwhile, the total number of adults has increased by nearly 3% to 138,937,000.” According to a Media Center report, “Over the last 10 years, circulation has dropped by 11.8% while the total number of U.S. households increased by 8.7%.”

Of course this is “old news” but for those of us who are responsible for training the next generation of reporters, editors, broadcasters, designers and photographers we will be better served if we keep up with the changing media environment.

We’ve been “SCOBLIZED”

Robert “the Scoblizer” Scoble, Microsoft’s technical evangelist, came to campus with a similar message last week. The Scoblizer is a celebrity blogger and techno-determinist who insists that people must start thinking about emerging technologies in new ways. Apparently, Robert is doing something right. He was recently featured in the Feb. 10 issue of the Economist for his work with Microsoft.

One of Scoble’s more important messages concerns media transparency in the age of the Internet and blogging, especially when it comes to the relationship between the press and corporate public relations specialists. Former San Jose Mercury News reporter and now a best-selling author of “We the Media”, Dan Gilmor is another great example of how people should be thinking about the future of journalism and the media.

At SJSU, Scoble’s visit has started us thinking about how we need to prepare ourselves and our students for the future. In an email to the School of Journalism and Mass Communications faculty this week, Professor Steve Greene observes how “astonished” Robert Scoble was to find may of the students thinking that “they would some day work in the journalism field at newspapers.” Professor Greene, believes that it in Scoble’s opinion, that world of traditional newspapering “was disappearing.”

Professor Greene sums up his observations by contending:

Every time I hear such predictions I get an awfully uneasy feeling. They may be overstated, they may never happen, but we should, at least, consider them. We do not.

And we ignore them at our peril. Every profession is replete with examples of practitioners who have clung to old ways of doing business long past the effective
date of their usefulness.

At the same time, another faculty member, Professor Robert Rucker, weighs in with a counter point to this argument.

I am sure blogging will affect journalism like TV news took readers away from papers. But I am confident, journalism principles and standards, which have consistently offered society accuracy and balanced reporting, will always make traditional journalism’s the gold standard for information delivery.

Both perspectives are extremely valuable and the message I take away from this is several-fold:

1) Communicative processes are evolving with emerging technologies such as the Internet, digital cameras, and mobile information platforms.

2) How people consume information and news is changing with the immediacy of the Web, especially with blogging.

3) We must continue to teach students the civic responsibilties embedded in the principles and standards of committing journalism in a digital age.